The traditional way for creating a software application has required many skilled workers such as a database administrator, UI designer, programmers as well as the process architects and business users that understand the workflow. Months of work are usually required to develop, test, and deploy even the simplest of workflow automation applications.
Recently, model-driven development (MDD) tools have incrementally improved this process, allowing users to describe each step of a workflow explicitly in a diagramming tool such as Microsoft Visio or equivalent software program, and much of the coding and user interface development is automated. The MDD tools have sped development up incrementally, in some cases up to 70 percent faster than the aforementioned traditional method. Yet much of the development of a software application is redundant because an application's structure is constrained by the data the workflow is designed to capture and display.
In view of the foregoing, an object of the invention is to provide improved methods and system for digital data processing.
A related object is to provide such methods and apparatus as can be used to build new software applications as well as modify existing software applications.
A further related object of the invention is to provide such methods and apparatus as can be used by both skilled and unskilled users to rapidly build and modify software applications without even seeing a line of code.
Yet a still further object of the invention is to provide such methods and apparatus as can be implemented and operated at reduced expense on existing and new platforms.